Monthly archives for August, 2013

Hi, everybody. Your classic movie guys back again today to finish providing answers to our Tyrone Power Quiz published on Aug. 21. We tend to get a bit long winded with our answers so we are covering all 10 in two blogs. Easier on the eyes.

Ok. Let’s get to solving the final five riddles posed about the life of this distinguished classic movie actor.

Question: One of Power’s three marriages was actually blessed in Rome by the Pope. True or False?

Answer: True. In January of 1949, Power and second wife Linda Christian were married in the Church of Santa Francesca Romana in the Eternal City, not far from the Colosseum. Power’s international fame drew thousands of fans outside the church. The event was fulsomely described as ‘the wedding of the century.’ The newly married couple was even received by Pope Pius XII, who blessed the union. Such grandly launched unions often turn out badly, and this one was no exception. The couple divorced in 1956. (A photo of the happy couple is above.)

Question: Who was Power’s second wife (clue, she was an international playgirl) and where did he meet her? 1) Barbara Payton in a Santa Monica bar; 2) Christina Onassis while swimming off the Greek Islands; 3) Linda Christian in a hotel in Europe; or 4) Deborah Ann Smith in New York City.

Answer: Ok, ok, we know we just gave away the answer above. But here’s more. In 1948, Power was having an affair with Lana Turner after separating from his first wife Annabella. The actor and international playgirl and sometime actress Linda Christian met in a hotel they just happened to be sharing in Rome. Romantically speaking, Turner suddenly was history.Yes, 3) Linda Christian is correct.

Question: How old was Power when he died? 1) 37; 2) 54; 3) 44; or 4) 61?

Answer: 3) 44. George Sanders was a Power costar in director King Vidor’s biblical epic, Solomon and Sheba, filmed in Spain and released in 1959. After several strenuous sword-fight scenes with Sanders, Power — who also co-produced the picture – collapsed complaining of pains in his chest and arms. The end came on Nov. 15, 1958, before the movie was completed. Sanders later wrote: (Power) spent his money freely. He had a yacht, a private aeroplane, and gave lavish parties. And women, who are usually more expensive than yachts and aeroplanes, found ways of spending his money when he ran out of ideas. Ty didn’t seem to mind. Perhaps he had some premonition that he did not need to save for his old age.

Question: Who was the actor who took over the leading role in Power’s last movie? 1) Yul Brynner; 2) Steve McQueen; 3) George Sanders; or 4) Maximilian Schell?

Answer: 1) Yul Brynner.

Question: Which actor was considered Power’s closest competition at the beginning of his movie career? 1) William Powell; 2) Mickey Rooney; 3) Robert Taylor; or 4) Ronald Colman?

Answer: 3) Robert Taylor. Power was hired as Fox’s answer to MGM’s Taylor (below with, you guessed it, LanaTurner).

Well, it turns out that at least some of you know a lot about Tyrone Power. We also suspect a lot more of you do but just aren’t saying. In any case, the classic movie guys are heartened.

Congrats to readers The Lady Eve (for nailing correct answers to all of the questions in our Tyrone Power Quiz) and to Le (who came very close). We know because they were generous enough to write in their answers. How did you do?

To find out, please check out the answers (below) to the first five questions in our Quiz, published on Aug. 21. We’ll finish up the final five in a future blog. Stay tuned.

Question: Power began his movie career at this prominent Hollywood studio, and was considered the protege of the studio’s mogul. Identify from the following the studio and its boss: 1) Monogram Pictures, Herbert Yates; 2) MGM, Louis B.Mayer; 3) Warner Bros., Jack Warner; or 4) 20th Century Fox, Darryl F. Zanuck.

Answer: 4) Zanuck and Fox. It almost didn’t turn out that way. While viewing the screen test of a 23-year-old Power, then a $60-per-week aspiring stage actor, Zanuck barked: “Take it off. He looks like a monkey.” The actor sported long eyebrows and hair that grew low on his forehead. Zanuck’s then wife, Virginia, made a suggestion: “shave his eyebrows.” They did and the “monkey” was converted into a star. True story.

Question: Which of Power’s movies was later remade by Bill Murray? 1) 1936′s Ladies inLove; 2) 1940′s The Mark of Zorro; 3) 1948′s The Luck of the Irish; or 4) 1946′s The Razor’sEdge?

Answer: 4) The Razor’s Edge. Yup, hard as it is to believe today, Bill Murray recreated Power’s role, as Larry Darrell, the young man who goes off to find himself, in 1984′s version of the film based on the Somerset Maugham novel. Both Power and Murray were in their thirties when taking on the role. Murray was fresh off the huge Columbia Pictures sci-fi comedy hit, Ghostbusters, and was hot at the time. Columbia couldn’t say “no” to his decision to go in a different direction. Perhaps they should have.

Question: Power married three times. His first wife went professionally by just one name. Who was she? 1) Cher; 2) Annabella; 3) Charo; 4) Bjork; or 5) Falconetti.

Answer: 2) Annabella. She was seven years older than Power, born in Paris in 1907 as Suzanne Georgette Charpentier. She married three times. Power was her last husband, from 1939 to 1948. It was felt that she qualified for the short list of European actresses who could make Hollywood films, a list that more notably included Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman and Marlene Dietrich. Although she never achieved comparable fame, Annabella did appear in some 50 titles in Hollywood and Europe. She remained friends with Power after their divorce, and visited him while he was making his final film. She died in her late 80′s, nearly double the years allotted to Power. She’s pictured below with Power and his frequent co-star Loretta Young.

Question: In which branch of the military did Power serve in World War II? 1) the Navy as a sailor; 2) Marines as a pilot; 3) Army as an infantryman; 4) or the Coast Guard as a customs inspector?

Answer: 2) Marines as a pilot. Power was genuinely courageous, flying in the Pacific Theater including transporting supplies into and the wounded from Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

Question: Which of the following did NOT have an affair with Power? 1) Joan Blondell; 2) Judy Garland; 3) Lana Turner (seen in the photo atop this blog) ; 4) Loretta Young?

Answer: Certainly 1) Joan Blondell and, we believe, 4) Loretta Young. Our reader correspondent The Lady Eve suspects Young may have been involved in the action, but we believe she saved her offscreen hijinks for Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable. By the way, Blondell was Power’s costar in his most interesting outing, the 1947 film noir Nightmare Alley.

One of the leading actors of the 1930s and 1940s who never stopped working in films, on radio, television and on the Broadway stage, then made a comeback in the 1980s and won a Oscar. That’s who.

In addition for having a career than spanned 60 years Don Ameche is also known for having one of the longest marriages of any Hollywood star. He and his wife HonorePrendergast were married in 1932, and for the ensuing 54 years until her death. And they raised six children.

Ameche was a family man. (Should we add that he was a Roman Catholic?) But he was also a soothingly competent actor and one of 20th Century Fox boss Darryl F. Zanuck’s favorites — because he was sooo reliable.

He was in scores of hit films. His best known are probably 1939′s The Story of Alexander GrahamBell and 1943′s Heaven Can Wait (his personal favorite). Joe especially likes him in 1939′s Midnight, the Billy Wilder-Charles Brackett romp with Claudette Colbert and 1941′s That Night in Rio. In that one he plays two roles, the love interest opposite both Carmen Miranda AND Alice Faye.

A brief digression about Ameche and the Graham Bell movie. Seems that back in the 1930′s, Zanuck and Frank Nugent enjoyed a highly competitive relationship. Nugentwas then chiefmovie reviewer of The New York Times, ”probably the first and last critic Zanuck paid serious attention to,” wrote the mogul’s biographer, Mel Gussow.

It seems that Nugent would take frequent and witty potshots at late 1930′s Fox pictures (cracks about “moss-covered” scripts, etc.). Nonetheless, Nugent praised Graham Bell when it came out largely because — it starred Ameche and NOT Tyrone Power, a special Zanuck favorite.

Wrote Gussow: Incensed at a slam of an actor who wasn’t even in the picture, both Fox and (New York’s) Roxy Theater cancelled all advertising in the ‘Times’ for almost a year.

Most people today remember Ameche because of his films as an older gentlemen. His movie career was revived by 1983′s Trading Places then 1985′s Cocoon (for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor), and its 1988 sequel, Cocoon, The Return

That’s a topless Don (left) with Hume Cronyn and Wilfred Brimley, his Cocoon and Cocoon TheReturn costars. (No question that Ameche looks better dressed.) That’s him (below) with his Oscar, looking uncomfortable standing next to someone by the name of Cher.

Finally, our pal Peter Besas, former Madrid correspondent of Variety, alerts us to the fact that Ameche was a genuinely good guy offscreen — and a good interview. Peter, who over the course of his career interviewed many stars, often in San Sebastian, writes with these impressions:

Perhaps the most pleasant (interviewee) was James Mason. The most unpleasant Robert Shaw. The most stupid, Lee Van Cleef. The most self-conceited Tony Curtis, when he already was getting old, over lunch, so I couldn’t escape.

One of the most charming, when he was already very old, was Don Ameche at the San Sebastian Film Festival. (Dominic Felix Ameche died in 1993, felled by prostate cancer, in Scottsdale, Arizona. He was 85.)

Back on Aug. 8, we published a blog extolling Twentieth Century Fox’s underrated 1950 “oater” The Gunfighter starring GregoryPeck. The movieremains an unjustifiably ignored gem that features Peck in a starring role that uncharacteristically is less than noble.

Well, today we have another offering in a similar vein.

One can argue that the Noir Film and the Western Film merged seven years before with the The OxBow Incident directed by William Wellman. The stylistic merger continued slowly, but one of the finest of the breed was 1949′s Yellow Sky, starring Peck and one of our very favorite actresses, Anne Baxter. The Fox production was also directed by Wellman.

Hello, everybody. Your Movie Chat Guys (follow us on twitter) back again. Years ago Joe and his co-author Ed Epstein worked with their pal the late John Griggs to produce the book The Films of Gregory Peck. When they did they screened all of Peck’s films and Joe was most impressed with Yellow Sky.

It’s about a gold mining grandpa and his feisty grandaughter (Baxter) in a desolate western town fending off assaults from a group of nasties including, yes, Gregory Peck. We won’t tell you much more about it. We want you to be as surprised by it as Joe was.

Suffice it to say it has great performances (note Richard Widmark), evocative black-and-white cinematography (by Joseph MacDonald) and a taut story line.

Although it is not well remembered today we think it a classic. And here’s a sidebar: The Writers Guild of America gave Lamar Trotti (the producer as well as co writer) and W.R. Burnett (his story and co writer of the screenplay) their award for “Best Written American Western” of 1949.

We’ll be publishing lots more shortly about various “best” westerns. But today, we just wanted to offer this brief recommendation. Yellow Sky, one to seek out.

He was known as the best dressed man in the movies. In fact his satire and his political affiliations and patriotic zeal may have overshadowed his acting career.

But Adolphe Menjou was an actor, a movie star and one whose career spanned the silents and the talkies, 149 film and tv titles in all beginning way back in 1914.

Hello, everybody. Your classic movie guys here today to remember one of the most colorful and well dressed figures in Hollywood annals, an actor of great versatility and authority (check out his seamless performance as a cynical French general in Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 war drama, Paths of Glory.)

Although he was a Catholic his first two marriages over a period of 14 years ended in divorce before he wed actress Verree Teasdale (with him below) in 1934. He stayed married to her until his death in 1963 at the age of 73.

Teasdale was an actress of note in her own right, and had a busy career early playing second leads in comedies and society wives and “the other woman” in dramas. She and Menjou worked together in the late Forties and Fifties co-hosting a syndicated interview show on radio. She outlived Menjou by more than two decades.

Unlike most of his contemporaries Menjou was well educated. He had an engineering degree from Cornell. But the lure of vaudeville was too great. Then the flickers. Then the talkies.

Interestingly, he worked as a haberdasher before getting into show business, and once a star, had a mustache named after him.

He easily segued from leading man to character actor, and worked pretty much right to the end. Perhaps his best known roles are as Oliver Niles in the 1937 edition of AStar is Born (the one with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March) and as that glib, amoral general in Paths of Glory. He easily moved from comedy to drama.

But his politics did not endear him to many in Hollywood.

He was a great supporter of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and its hunt for Communists in tinsel town. Katherine Hepburn hated Menjou, and wouldn’t speak to him while they were filming Frank Capra’s fast-pace 1948 political drama, State of the Union. (Others including Noel Coward disdained Menjou’s political views, but the actor didn’t seem to care.)

Whatever his differences with Hepburn, Menjou drew plaudits for his performance in the Capra movie. And for many others. One solid actor.

Is there a more frustrating experience for a dedicated classic movie fan than being told at the local video store that a much-sought-after title perhaps a bit out of mainstream is NOT available on DVD?

Hello, everybody. Your classic movie guys recalling today that we published not too long ago blogs about a pair worthy films that were simply unavailable on DVD. Rats!

No sooner had we lamented that fact than a reader missive updating us rolled in from Samuel Cochran, who keeps track of these things. And, it’s at least partially good news (no wonder we love reader email).

Hello Joe and Frank,

I went back looking for someone in your archives and you talked about 2 films that are impossible to obtain, at least until now.
1) from 5/30, the 1960 ‘The Angel Wore Red’ is completely unavailable on DVD. Turner plays it but does not sell it. I got a copy from someone who copied a Turner broadcast.
I voted on their site for a DVD release but who knows?

2) from 4/24, the 1954 ‘Journey to Italy’ was always on my wish list but never released on DVD until now. I’m very excited to tell you that Criterion is releasing ’3 Films By Roberto Rossellini’ in Blu-Ray on 9/24. ‘Journey to Italy’ (never available), ‘Europa ’51′ (never available), and ‘Stromboli’. I’ll be the first in line.

In 1960 Ava Gardner costarred with British actor Dirk Bogarde (both seen above) and Joseph Cotton in a not-great but oddly enjoyable historical drama set during the Spanish Civil War, The Angel Wore Red, written and directed by Nunnally Johnson.

Ava’s role was that of a “cabaret singer” although it’s clear when you see The Angel WoreRed that “prostitute” is the more accurate characterization. She harbors for a night in her bedroom a handsome former priest (Bogarde) on the run from various Civil War factions. As Johnson put it, its was a tale of “horny priest and virgin-type prostie.”

Bogarde told a British newspaper in 1961 that the movie provided a magnificent part for Ava. It would have done for her what “Two Women” did for Sophia Loren. She really put her heart into it. (Two Women won Loren a best actress Oscar in 1962.)

Cotton, who portrays a veteran, one-eyed war correspondent who sports a beret and eye patch, is in the movie and a dead ringer for Hollywood director Raoul Walsh. In his autobiography, Cotton said of Ava that she was born to be an actress; I never saw her make a false move or miss a word.

In any case, it’s a blankety-blank shame that The Angel Wore Red is STILL not out on DVD.

Terrific news about Criterion’s new reissue of Journey To Italy, the movie that George Sanders made in Italy in 1953 opposite Ingrid Bergman. Directed in black and white by Bergman’s then husband Robert Rossellini, Viaggo in Italia (Journey To Italy) follows a worn out middle-aged couple’s visit to Naples to dispose of a deceased relative’s villa.

The vitality of the surrounding Neapolitans effects the couple in ways that they could not have predicted. Few movies portray the vicissitudes of a long term marriage more realistically and honestly than this one.

As it turns out, Sanders hated making the picture. He had accepted the offer because of his admiration for the director and also because he wished to work with Bergman again (Sanders and Bergman were teamed at MGM, and appeared in 1941′s Rage In Heaven).

But upon his arrival in Naples, (Sanders) learned that the Maestro, as he came to call Rossellini disdainfully, intended to shoot the picture without a script. This and other of the director’s eccentricities — aimless shooting, jumbled dialogue, non-existent plot — eventually reduced George to tears of frustration, according to Sanders biographer Richard VanDerBeets.

When he asked to be released from the picture, he was told that Rossellini, whose reputation was at a low ebb, had been able to raise money for the production only by getting a ’name’ actor to costar with Bergman and that backing had been secured on the basis of his being in the film. (Sanders) felt ill-used…

Be that as it may, he wound up giving the performance of his career. We too look forward to the newly release Blu Ray edition of this fine film.

Arthur Fellig is most certainly a name that won’t ring many bells today with classic movie fans, but his nom de plume — “Weegee” — might since Fellig achieved over the years considerable renown in photography circles as well as a certain reverence in Hollywood.

Fellig was an Austrian immigrant who, as Weegee, toiled as a freelance still photographer working the police beat in New York City in the Thirties and Forties. This was when getting your shot on the front page of one of Gotham’s tabloids was a lucrative achievement.

And Weegee was the best at his trade, working with his reliable Speed Graphic along with a police radio in his 1938 Chevy and a makeshift photo lab in the trunk. He was most often the first to photograph a crime scene, and the gawkers who collected there.

His moody, sometimes alarming shots, were seen and admired by Hollywood’s post-war film noir creators as part of THE look — shadowy, evocative, as sharp and stinging as a slap in the face.

Weegee’s influence on still photography was powerful (his work currently sits in a permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art). His influence on Hollywood’s noir genre was less marked, but nonetheless evident in the cinematography and in the gritty urban milieus. Weegee loved New York, and the city turned out to be the model for many noir urban settings.

And, oh, the subject matter. A perfect match. Weegee loved to photograph celebrities in performance or in distress, murdered criminals, ladies of the evening at their leisure, couples embracing on lonely beaches and, of course, dead bodies. He said he took shots of the corpses “from angles that make ‘em look comfortable.”

The 1945 collection of his work, Naked City dedicated “to you the people of New York,” includes a shot of a black swing band flying loftily at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, the Metropolitan Opera’s male chorus gearing up for opening night, Frank Sinatra wooing bobbysoxers at the Paramount Theater on Broadway and an intriguing shot of an auto accident victim lying just outside the marquee of a movie house showing 1938′s romantic musical, Joy of Living costarring Irene Dunne and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

Naked City was Weegee’s entree into Hollywood since the book is said to have inspired the Universal’s crime drama of the same title, produced by Mark Hellinger, directed by Jules Dassin and costarring Barry Fitzgerald and Howard Duff. Set in New York, of course, the film Naked City is a realistic look at a laborious police trackdown of a twisted criminal who murders a blond model in her apartment. Perfect Weegee material.

He actually made on onscreen appearance in a superb noir thriller also right out of Weegee territory — about a washed up fighter (Robert Ryan) who runs afoul of the mob by NOT throwing a fight. The Set Up, directed by Robert Wise, costars one of noirs most accomplished femme fatales, Audrey Totter. Watch the movie’s very realistic fight scenes carefully since Weegee appears for a fraction of a second (blink and you’ll miss him) as the ringside time keeper.

Wegee also caught the fancy of director Stanley Kubrick, no stranger to film noir thanks to the movie that established him: 1956′s The Killing, a racetrack heist-gone-awry drama costarring Sterling Heyden, Colleen Gray, Vince Edward, Elisha Cook Jr. and Marie Windsor. Weegee was hired years later as some sort of “special effects adviser” on Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb.

In 1992, Universal relased The Public Eye (available on DVD in the Universal Vault Collection) featuring Joe Pesci playing 1940′s crime photog, “Leon Bernstein.” The movie’s principal character was based on Weegee.

Before he died in 1968, Weegee appeared as himself in an obscure 1966 indie “pseudo documentary” titled The Improbable Mr. Wee Gee. It was about a photographer who falls in love with a window store dummy. The movie was made and distributed by an outfit called American Film Distributing Corp.

If anyone out there has actually seen The Improbable Mr. Wee Gee, we’d love to hear all about it.

He was right up there with Gary Cooper and Clark Gable in the ranks of Hollywood’s handsomest leading men.

He was so popular that mothers named their sons after him, presumably in hopes that they would turn out as strikingly good looking.

He was one of the few Hollywood stars who actually saw combat while serving in the military during World War II.

He was stereotyped as a dashing leading man in romantic period films although his best role was as a down-and-out carnival hustler.

Tyrone Edmund Power came from a long line of distinguished thespians (his father, Tyrone Sr., was a stage and screen star, his mother was a Shakespearean actress), and he lit up the screen from 1936 to his death decades years later.

Yet, your classic movie guys suspect that Power is not as well known today as he should be. Are we wrong about that?

To find out, we decided to publish this Tyrone Power quiz. Let’s see how much you really do know about this fine actor.

Question: Power began his movie career at this prominent Hollywood studio, and was considered the protege of the studio’s mogul. Identify from the following the studio and its boss: 1) Monogram Pictures, Herbert Yates; 2) MGM, Louis B.Mayer; 3) Warner Bros., Jack Warner; or 4) 20th Century Fox, Darryl F. Zanuck.

Question: Which of Power’s movies was later remade by Bill Murray? 1) 1936′s Ladies inLove; 2) 1940′s The Mark of Zorro; 3) 1948′s The Luck of the Irish; or 4) 1946′s The Razor’sEdge?

Question: Power married three times. His first wife went professionally by just one name. Who was she? 1) Cher; 2) Annabella; 3) Charo; 4) Bjork; or 5) Falconetti.

Question: In which branch of the military did Power serve in World War II? 1) the Navy as a sailor; 2) Marines as a pilot; 3) Army as an infantryman; 4) or the Coast Guard as a customs inspector?

Question: Which of the following did NOT have an affair with Power? 1) Joan Blondell; 2) Judy Garland; 3) Lana Turner; 4) Loretta Young?

Question: One of Power’s three marriages was actually blessed in Rome by the Pope. True or False?

Question: Who was Power’s second wife (clue, she was an international playgirl) and where did he meet her? 1) Barbara Payton in a Santa Monica bar; 2) Christina Onassis while swimming off the Greek Islands; 3) Linda Christian in a hotel in Europe; or 4) Deborah Ann Smith in New York City.

Question: How old was Power when he died? 1) 37; 2) 54; 3) 44; or 4) 61?

Question: Who was the actor who took over the leading role in Power’s last movie? 1) Yul Brynner; 2) Steve McQueen; 3) George Sanders; or 4) Maximilian Schell?

Question: Which actor was considered Power’s closest competition at the beginning of his movie career? 1) William Powell; 2) Mickey Rooney; 3) Robert Taylor; or 4) Ronald Colman?

Hello, everybody. Your classic movie guys noting that we have probably received more (and more impassioned) emails about the late Deanna Durbin than any other star we’ve written about.

And we’ve written about her nearly a dozen different times, the latest blog (Farewell Deanna, May 7) occasioned by her death on April 30 at the age of 91 .

For those who may have forgotten, the Canada-born Deanna rivaled Judy Garland at MGM — both a mere 13 when they started at the studio – and then moved to Universal where her huge popularity in a series of movies literally saved the studio. Her movie career comprised 21 titles, and crested in 1946 when she became the second-highest-paid woman in America (Bette Davis was first).

The New York Times obituary described the onscreen Deanna as everyone’s kid sister or spunky daughter, a wholesome, radiant, can-do girl who…was always fixing the problems of unhappy adults. That pretty much was Durbin’s image off screen as well, generously talented but essentially homespun wholesome. A very good girl.

Then there is the matter of Joseph Cotten and Deanna (pictured above), the Virginia gentlemen and the wunderkind from Winnipeg. In 1943, the pair were costarring at Universal in the musical drama, Hers To Hold.

According to Cotten’s most readable 1987 autobiography, Vanity Will Get You Somewhere, the two coincidentally slept over one night — separately — in their respective studio quarters, arriving at the lot an hour apart from each other.

Shortly after the powerful Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper’s phone rang, and an item appeared in her column the next day that Cotten and Durbin, married to others at the time, were indeed an item.

Cotten was furious, denied that he was sleeping with Deanna, and personally phoned the columnist with this statement: If you mention my name in your column personally again, I’ll kick you in the ass.

Cut to a swanky dinner at the Beverly Hills Hotel soon after, where Cotten delivered on his threat. Hedda was sitting in a cane-bottomed chair, and contact (of the kick) was positive enough to disturb the flower garden on top of one of the outrageous hats for which she was renowned, the actorwrote.

After a moment of stunned silence a “group of gentlemen” surrounded the Cotten, carrying him from the room on their shoulders to the bar, where I was toasted in champagne by all.

All this makes a comment made in the mid-Eighties by Orson Welles — Cotten’s close lifelong friend and colleague (Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, Journey Into Fear, Touch of Evil) — especially interesting. As quoted in the newly-published My Lunches With Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles(Henry Holt and Company, Metropolitan Books), Welles speaks directly about the Durbin-Cotten affair.

What Hedda was doing was printing that (Cotten) was balling Deanna Durbin, which he was. In cars, in daylight, where everybody could see.

About the derrier-kicking, Wells added, the truth is that Joe Cotten was a Southern gentleman, with extremely good manners…the last man in Hollywood that you’d think would behave that way to a woman.

In any case, never happy making pictures, Durbin retired in the late Forties and set up residence with her third husband, French director Charles David, in a small village (Neauphle-le-Chateau) outside Paris. There she raised her two children, avoided reporters at all cost and supposedly sang in her signature soprano for an hour each day right up until her death.

There’s lots more to tell, and we do so in what we have published so far: A Deanna Durbin Quiz (March 13, 2012) and the Answers (March 23, 2012); Who Was Deanna Durbin? (Oct. 7, 2011) and — most especially — three blogs based on contributions from faithful reader and avid Durban fan, Mark: Need To Know Deanna Durbin – A Reader Authoritatively Tells All (Nov. 10, 2011); Deanna Durbin – Rival To Judy? (Nov. 11, 2011); and Deanna Durbin – A Glamour Puss? How Insulting (Nov. 10, 2012).

When his marriage to Wyman fell apart in 1948, Reagan (37 at the time) was dismayed and bewildered, and he turned to the warm, earthy and sexually inviting Roc.

Roc, though, was seriously alarmed by Reagan’s mental state.

He was just wretched and miserable, she said. He adored his wife and family (the marriage to Wyman produced two children, the late Maureen Reagan and author-broadcaster Michael Reagan), and just couldn’t ­understand why or how she had completely lost interest in him. Had I been older, I suppose I would have realized that he was suffering a sort of breakdown, as he was quite often in tears and ­dangerously depressed.

He several times told me: ‘Life just isn’t worth living any more. I just don’t see the point of going on.’

According to Roc: If I went to dinner with another man, he would tip the waiters to get a table next to mine, where he would sit alone and stare at me.

She claims, We became lovers because, quite frankly, I was scared and lonely on my arrival in Hollywood, and sex seemed the only thing to alleviate his utter misery. I was seriously concerned that he might do something to himself if I didn’t make him feel that somebody wanted him, because his wife sure as hell didn’t.

In her autobiography Roc also states: Of course, we had to be extremely careful how and where we met, especially as he was still locked into one of the highest-profile ­marriages in Hollywood. We could both have lost our contracts had we been caught out.

Patricia Roc only made one film in Hollywood – Jaques Tourneur’s off beat western, 1946′s Canyon Passage costarring Dana Andrews, Brian Donlevy and Susan Hayward – then returned to London. Wyman and Reagan divorced, and then Reagan went to England to so-star in 1949′s The Hasty Heart with Patricia Neal and RichardTodd.

By this time Roc was one of Britain’s top ten box-office stars. At the Royal Command Film ­Performance at the Odeon, Leicester Square, in November 1948, Roc and Reagan both appeared on stage. Supposedly their affair was reignited.

Ronnie seemed heartbroken and bitterly hurt, said Roc. His wife had told him: ‘You’re a bore! Get out! I want a divorce.’ He was so damaged that often he was drinking and not able to perform sexually. He spent a lot of time at my London flat in Hallam Street, and ­repeatedly asked me to marry him.

But Roc ended the affair, and Reagan returned to Hollywood. A few years later he met a 28-year-old aspiring actress, Nancy Davis, and wed her in March of 1952.